Overprotective Parents, Underdeveloped Kids

Adapted from the book “Raising Bully-Proof Kids”

by Paul Coughlin, Published by Revell

Steve wasn’t prepared for adult life. This fact has been driven into him in part through his own
troubled conscience; it’s been driven in even more by his wife of eighteen years, fed up with be-
ing the only proactive adult in the home.
“She screamed at me—Stephen, you’re such an idiot, you don’t know how to be a man!’” he told
me.
“That must be hard to hear,” I offered.
“It is, but it’s true,” he said.

Steve got the whammy, the full nice-guy childhood. He lived a highly disciplined life; his par-
ents had micromanaged his childhood, too often overriding his will and fighting too many of his
battles. Steve wan’t allowed to select his own clothing or choose the color of his own room. His
friends were handpicked by his parents. His mom determined his hairstyle even into high school.

None of this paved any paths for him to make friends or get along with others. HE says now,
“I put a lot of rules on games back then. Playing with me wasn’t play. It was work. Kids needed
a manual to play with me.”

Once in elementary school, he was painfully reminded of this when the other kids excluded
him from dodge ball, gobbling up all the balls in the playground’s equipment shed. Then he
wanted his own ball to bounce around, and his overprotective mom sprung into action. “Soon I
was given a brand-new rubber ball with large initials written on it in black permanent ink.” But
in the world of children, she may as well have written “LOSER” instead of Steve’s initials.
Steve’s mom thought she was being a good mother, but her intervention made matters worse.
“Kids ridiculed me even more. I didn’t want the ball. I kicked it into a neighbor’s backyard when
no one was looking.”

As an adult, Steve looks to his wife to make the decisions in their marriage. She’s the driving
force, and her drive is weakening. She’s tired from having to do almost all the daily lifting. Steve
was conditioned to wait on others to make decisions for him; he’s passive, and he’s never devel-
oped the ability to make choices. Steve has learned how to be helpless and reactionary due to
overprotection. Growing up, he wasn’t allowed even limited dominion over expression of who
he was. Small decisions, such as what kind of books he could read, or what he wanted to do on a
Saturday afternoon, was made for him. Or more accurately, against him. His will was hijacked
by his parents.

Max’s story is not better. His mom had a difficult upbringing that included physical and emo-
tional abuse. She vowed that when she became a mother, she would not perpetuate the same mis-
takes—she wanted her son to experience none of the pain she’d endured. Unfortunately, she
failed to see the difference between debilitating suffering and the kind of day-to-day distress that
gradually teaches children how to thrive in the real rough-and-tumble world.

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 They lived in relative ease and privilege, but Max’s mom lived as though every object and
idea in existence could (and would) harm him. Her campaign to scrub his world of discomfort
began when he was a newborn. She would search the inside of his sleepers for an imperfect
seam. Anything with the hint of a rough spot was rejected and thrown away.

She verbally horsewhipped neighborhood kids if they hurt his feelings. She soon became
known as the “crazy lady” up the street. If he had a complaint about a class, she was there in a
moment, telling the teacher how bad she was at her job. She was the kind of mom educators love
to see leave their school, the kind that makes good teachers leave the profession.

She had in her mind an immature mantra: Protect my son at all costs. And sadly, at least for a
while, she succeeded—her overprotective approach smothered him. Her protection further iso-
lated Max from the world of boys and men, who found him odd and his company distortable. He
didn’t act like a man in the making. Nor did he show much interest. He hung out on the sidelines
of life, rarely saying or doing anything of substance. He dropped out of high school and sold
drugs.

Max doesn’t remember being disciplined, and so he never acquired self-discipline. He also
didn’t receive any parental consequences for his increasing criminal behavior. He was a product
of his age, of good-intentioned parenting that followed this contemporary belief: Good self-es-
teem comes from always feeling good about yourself, from never feeling pain or discomfort,
from having every potential risk screened and eliminated before it reaches you.

Obsessive hyper-management was like a moniker on a sweater: Good Mother. You could see
it in her eyes and in her stride when she swooped into action on behalf of her son, the project into
which she funneled her fears. She believed that the wake forming behind her—roiling with bel-
ligerence and insults upon those misfortunate enough to receive her abuse—was clearing the way
to a brighter future for her only child.

Hers weren’t just everyday run-of-the-mill battles, the kind that make up the usual grind of
life. From the tone in her voice, the resolve in her eyes, and purposeful heaviness in her stride,
she seemed to see herself as a present-day Joan of Arc. Hers was a crusade: Good Versus Evil.
How could anyone reproach such earnestness, such fervor, such seeming nobility?

The current result of her hovering and bullying parental philosophy? Max is addicted to
heroin, is in and out of prison, and sleeps in his car. He, like her, is fragile, broken, and depleted.
He was overprotected, and now he is undernourished and underdeveloped. His scars, as with all
emotional scars, still contain wisdom and hard-to-decipher signposts pointing the way back to
wholeness. Yet he doesn’t have the skills, preserving, or courage to unearth them, study them,
learn from them, and repent—he has no idea how to proactively turn away from lies and toward
truth. He needs a soul transplant.

A Most Well-Intentioned Disaster

Countless other men and women have grown up under overprotection, the new societal mandate
for stressed-out and nervous parents. It’s a culture full of round-the-clock worrying, consistent

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second-guessing, nocturnal teeth grinding, and coffee-drenched mornings. It’s where we run to
find quick answers and complete solutions to any little problem our children face; we do this
whenever we have little or no faith that the issue could be worked out over time and doesn’t need
our constant attention and intervention. Where we speed down to our child’s school and bring
them their homework assignments and books because they accidentally left them at home, in-
stead of letting reality sink in and teach. Where parents pay their children money every time they
win a game. Where parents call coaches and scold them because their child didn’t make the
team. Where kids aren’t allowed to play on safe streets because parents are freaked out about
kidnapping.

Many men, like me, struggle with parenting that smothers, though women are front-lining the
charge in this obsession with overprotecting children.

One reason women are in charge of this unfortunate conquest is found in Max’s life. His
mother had unfulfilled and frustrated romantic yearnings, energy from which is often channeled
into hyper-parental vigilance, leading to highly enmeshed mother/son relationships that debilitate
young men. Specifically, maternal overprotection leads to victimization: It is one of the most
powerful predictors that the son will be picked on in school and that he will not offer resistance.
When a boy’s mother drastically eliminates his exploration of the world and vicariously fights
his battles, he will be perceived as a victim—in particular, a passive victim.

Writes Dr. Debra Peplar, professor of Psychology at York University:

Maternal overprotection predicts victimization if during conflict children feel compelled to

submit—and are also afraid. If boys internalize the negative messages about themselves that
are implied in the inept parenting of overprotection, and come to feel that Mother’s wish is
their command, then the boundaries with their mother are blurred.

Furthermore, a good desire to nurture, taken too far, can be far too much of a good thing.
Here is Dr. James Dobson’s gentle explanation:

From about three years of age, your little pride and joy begins making his way into the world
of other people….This initial “turning nose” period is often extremely threatening to the
compulsive [often an overprotective] mother. Her natural reaction is to hold her baby close to
her breast, smothering him in “protection.” By watching, guarding, defending, and shielding
night and day, perhaps she can spare her child some of the pain she herself experienced
growing up. However, her intense desire to help may actually interfere with growth and de-
velopment. Certain risks must be tolerated if a child is to learn and progress.

Contrary to our assumptions, kids who receive constant parental protection don’t do better in
life. When they are too often harbored from inevitable hardships and challenges, they do not de-
velop a keen understanding of their own abilities and weaknesses. Sometimes they become over-
confident, possessing a distorted sense of themselves; most of the time they lack confidence,
some to the brink of social anxiety and clinical depression, prime targets for childhood bullying
that can persist into adulthood.

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 These latter kids, over months and years of not being able to grow, have a vital life power
gradually drained from them, making them unable to donate power to others and to live inten-
tionally and courageously. Some never fully recover. Others spend part or most of their adult-
hood “getting their life back,” or rather, becoming themselves for the first time; many of these do
so only after devastating blows like divorce, career chaos, or bankruptcy.

Whether overprotected children become arrogant (overconfident) or self-diminishing (uncon-

fident), they share the same malady: they focus too much on themselves, and not enough on oth-
ers. This is a basic component of narcissism; narcissists of all kinds are socially inept, repeatedly
displaying behavior that breaks relational ties with others, pushing them further into the pit of
isolation.

Kids Need to Feel Bad Sometimes

If you want to shock contemporary sensibilities, tell today’s parents that their little ones need to
feel life’s inevitable stings from time to time. Not the kind that crushes their spirit, but the kind
that awakens their discernment, increases their understanding, and gives them wisdom about the
realities of life. Explains child psychologist David Elkind, professor at Tufts University: “We
learn through experience, and we learn through bad experiences. Through failure we learn how
to cope.”

While speaking to parents about raising kids with successful character, Dr. Henry Cloud was
asked: “If there is one thing that is most important to teach children about success, what would it
be?”

“I would teach them how to lose,” he said.

A woman tilted her head, looked at him strangely, and asked, “why in the world would you
want to teach them how to lose?”

“Because they will,” Cloud said emphatically.

The most important lesson children gain from losing is that the difference between winners
and losers is not that winners never lose.

The difference is that winners lose well, and losers lose poorly. As a result, winners lose less
in the future and do not lose the same way that they lost last time, because they have learned
from the loss and do not repeat the pattern. But losers do not learn from what they did and
tend to carry that loss or pattern forward into the next venture, or relationship, and repeat the
same way of losing.

This fundamental building block of successful living is being denied a growing number of
children. In various ways, their parents are not allowing them to fail in a meaningful way. Not
surprisingly, though, another dramatic venue for this burgeoning problem is schools. A study
from Sydney, Australia, shows that principals as well as teachers are having difficulty handling a
growing number of parents who are “aggressive, pestering, vexatious, and unreasonable…who

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are convinced beyond reason that their children are supremely gifted and talented….The burnout
rate for teachers in their first three to five years is as high as 30 percent, research shows.” The ar-
ticle says that one out-of-control mother, who refused to acknowledge that her child was a trou-
ble maker, suggested that the school punish the student next to him, “because that would be
enough to shock him into behaving.” A University of Sydney study shows that teachers leaving
the profession in droves at about 29, only a few years out of college.

Some schools are accommodating our culture’s belief that life’s bumps and bruises should be
eradicated from the lives of our children. An elementary school in Santa Monica, California, ex-
presses a negative opinion of a game that it considers both physically dangerous and potentially
harmful to a child’s developing psyche. That game is tag.

“The running part of this activity is healthy and encouraged; however, in this game, there is a
‘victim’ or ‘it,’ which creates a self-esteem issue. ” Should we replace hide-and-seek with don’t-
find-me-too-quicky-or-I-might-feel-bad?

Nations far and wide are losing their nerve to truly help children succeed. Rod Morgan, a for-
mer professor of criminology and now chairman of the Youth Justice Board in England, says
thousands of children are ending up in court because teachers are afraid to discipline students for
bad behavior out of fear that they will be brought into court. Morgan is using his country to rally
around teachers who struggle to contain bad-behavior children—especially single-parent chil-
dren.

We know that the proportion of families where young parents—often mothers bringing up a
child alone without the presence of a male role model and a father present on the scene, and
without the support of an extended family—are having to cope with more and more challeng-
ing child behavior in fairly deprived areas. This has to be confronted. Teachers have to sup-
ported to explain the need for boundaries, to enforce boundaries, but to do it in a manner
which remains inclusive and to do it in a more assertive manner for those parents who may
collude with their own children’s bad behavior.

It is a common mistake to hold on to the things we love too tightly. As with Max’s mom, it
can feel so noble and so right. But good intentions aside, the consequences of wrongly raising
our kids can be deadly. It’s not so much that we need to do more. It’s that what we’re doing
needs to be different. We need to change course.